Andy McCarthy's Faithless Execution

My good friend Andy McCarthy has another book out, "Faithless Execution," which couldn't be timelier in view of the deplorable state of current events in America.

Though I have been a consistent critic of President Barack Obama's — decrying his lawlessness and his disastrous and destructive policies — I have always replied in the negative when people have asked me whether Republicans should pursue impeachment against him.

My response has never been based on any doubt that Obama has committed impeachable offenses. Rather, it has been my painful awareness that impeachment is more a political matter than it is a legal one, and enormous political obstacles would surely prevent the successful conclusion of such a pursuit.

Sure, there's a chance a sufficient number of Republican representatives would support such an action, and impeachment, after all, is the prerogative of the House and not the Senate. But impeachment is only the formal charge against the president for the alleged offenses. Impeachment is followed by a trial in the Senate, and Democrats control the Senate. Only upon conviction by the Senate would the president be removed.

Other political considerations are relevant, as well. If Republican politicians and conservative commentators are reflexively accused of racism merely for criticizing Obama, can you imagine what kind of race baiting would ensue if Republicans actually proceeded to impeach the man? Even if race weren't an issue, the sad reality is that the modern Democratic Party is nothing if not partisan, and it would never go along with any effort to bring Obama to account for alleged "high Crimes and Misdemeanors." President Bill Clinton committed felony perjury, and Democrats wouldn't consider turning on him.

Not only that but with the collusion of the liberal media, Democrats have successfully revised history to paint Republicans as the wrongdoers for impeaching Clinton. Any misconduct of Clinton's was sanitized as merely about sex and having nothing to do with dishonoring his office and obstructing justice.

If we've learned anything from the Clinton impeachment ordeal, it is that impeachment is primarily a political matter, in the sense that it simply will not be successful unless the public is behind the effort. That is where Andy's book comes in.

The book's subtitle says it all: "Building the Political Case for Obama's Impeachment." Andy fully recognizes that unless we build the political case, the legal case is pointless, no matter how compelling.

Andy is not saying that we should impeach Obama right now. He understands that you can't effectively impeach (and convict and remove) Obama without the political support of the people but that you are not going to build that political support unless you convince them there is a strong legal case against him that warrants removal.

But making the legal case involves demonstrating the broader definition of impeachable offenses, showing how Obama has committed them and then further convincing the people that these offenses constitute an assault on and a grave danger to our constitutional republic.

How does Andy — a lawyer's lawyer and a prosecutor's prosecutor — make his case? Here's where it gets interesting. He first provides us with a tutorial in limited government as crafted by our Constitution's framers and shows how our liberty utterly depends on this brilliant constitutional structure. He also gives us a primer on impeachment and what types of offenses constitute "high Crimes and Misdemeanors." Then he dovetails the two subjects together.

For it just so happens that the framers adopted this British historical impeachment standard precisely because they wanted the remedy available for those cases in which the president threatens the very framework of government through his actions.

That is, the framers wanted impeachable offenses to include not only criminal acts or other acts of moral turpitude but also those instances in which the president grossly breaches his fiduciary duty to the people to faithfully execute the laws of the land and to uphold the Constitution.

As Andy demonstrates in meticulous detail, President Obama has systematically undermined our system through his egregious pattern of lawlessness and disregard for the Constitution. Instead of honoring the rule of law, he has become the ruler of law. By usurping and abusing power, he has imperiled our separation of powers and our federalist system and thus our structure of limited government, on which our liberties depend.

As you can see, this is not about judging Obama and punishing him for wrongdoing as you would a criminal. It's about preserving our form of government and thus our liberties from his systematic threats. It is the opposite of how Democrats characterized (read: trivialized) Clinton's offenses, which was that he had just lied about sex. For Obama's offenses couldn't be more serious if we Americans still cherish our Constitution and our liberties.

The persuasiveness of Andy's trenchant and cogent arguments depends on whether we as a people still believe in liberty and limited government or we've become so jaded that we think of government as merely a means to our political ends. Do we want our government to safeguard our liberties or to determine winners and losers? Unless Americans still cherish their liberties and can be convinced that upholding the Constitution and the rule of law is essential to preserving them, any effort to impeach Obama would be pointless.

But if anyone has made the case, it is Andy McCarthy in this excellent book.